Bachmann: Obama Takes Orders from Gen. Axelrod

Rather than attack any of the GOP contenders head on, Rep. Michele Bachmann kept President Obama in her cross-hairs during Wednesday night’s CNBC debate.

Bachmann accused Obama of taking his orders on how to create jobs from political adviser David Axelrod rather than from “job creators.”

“Well, I would say President Obama is the one that’s wrong, because President Obama’s plan for job creation has absolutely nothing to do with the true people who know how to create jobs. He should really be going to job creators if he wants to know how to create jobs. Instead, he continues to go to a General Axelrod in Chicago to look for his orders to figure out how to deal with the economy,” she said.

This is a riff on a comment Bachmann routinely makes on the stump. She usually jokes that Obama is making decisions about Afghanistan with the aid of Gen. Axelrod and not Gen. John Allen, the IASF commander.

The Minnesota congresswoman said more jobs could be created by cutting the tax rate, repealing regulations like Dodd-Frank, expanding or “legalizing” energy production, and building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Bachmann blamed the “geniuses” at Freddie and Fannie for the housing crisis and said those agencies continued to hurt the economy by paying large executive bonuses and receiving another federal “bailout.”

“For these geniuses to give 10 of their top executives bonuses at $12 million and then have the guts to come to the American people and say, ‘Give us another $13 billion to bail us out just for the quarter’ — that’s lunacy. We need to put them back into bankruptcy and get them out of business. They’re destroying the housing market,” she said.

Asked in a post debate interview to weigh-in on Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s gaffe, in which he could not remember the third of three government agencies he said he would cut, Bachmann sympathized.

“It was a tough moment. All of us recognize it was something none of us would want to go through. I felt bad for him,” she said in a post-debate interview with CNBC.